How Ribbon Communications Is Creating Secure Real-Time Communications For Today's Digital World

When we think of our telecommunications experiences, we want them to be seamless and instant - as if we were conversing with someone face-to-face. We don’t expect a delay in our in-person interactions, and in our fast-paced, always-on world, our digital lives are no exception. Real-time communication technology allows for live information sharing and digital interaction with our coworkers, colleagues and friends and is what makes chat rooms, social media, video conferencing, screen sharing and collaboration tools possible.

In order to make real-time communications a reality, these tools must not only be fast, they must also be secure enough to protect the network from threats that jeopardize our ability to reliably communicate with others, such as denial of service attacks.

That’s where Ribbon Communications comes in.

Ribbon Communications builds secure real-time communications tools for both legacy networks and next-generation mobile and cloud environments. Born out of the recent Sonus Networks and GENBAND merger that was finalized last October, Ribbon Communications brings together two companies that have been at the forefront of real-time communications for the past two decades into one unified organization.

The newly combined company boasts a team of professionals from around the world, whose goal is to help service providers and enterprises navigate the transition of bringing secure real-time communications from legacy environments to the mobile and cloud-based digital economy.

“The combination between Sonus and GENBAND made sense for many reasons. For the past two decades, Sonus has been a leader in real-time communications, securely delivering seamless communications experiences to service providers and enterprises across legacy, fixed and next-generation mobile and cloud environments,” said Patrick Joggerst, Executive Vice President for Ribbon Communications, in an interview. “GENBAND, on the other hand, is well known for its market-leading network transformation and cloud communications portfolio, which includes its award-winning Kandy communications platform as a service (CPaaS). Kandy allows service providers, enterprises and independent software vendors to embed contextual communications capabilities into business and consumer applications for a more engaging user experience.”

In addition, Ribbon Communications will continue offering media gateways, session border controllers (SBCs) and security and analytics solutions. Media gateways are switching elements that convert digital media streams between disparate telecommunications networks, whereas SBCs are devices that are used in communications networks for providing robust security, simplified interoperability, routing and other functions. Essentially, SBCs act as an enterprise’s first layer of protection against attacks on exposed voice and video endpoints, mitigating malware, telephony denial of service (TDoS) and other potential attacks that threaten unified communications users.

Verizon, one of Ribbon’s largest service provider customers, recently started offering Ribbon’s cloud-based virtualized SBC as a pay-as-you-go, subscription-based managed service offering through its Virtual Network Services, which allows its enterprise customers to quickly and cost-effectively protect their networks from these kinds of attacks without having to invest in dedicated network hardware. When businesses want to deliver new services or keep ahead of seasonal demands, it often requires them to install and configure additional network hardware. That can be time consuming, costly and labor intensive. “Offering Ribbon’s virtualized SBC as a service allows Verizon’s enterprise customers to quickly deploy advanced network protection from toll fraud and TDoS threats in days, as opposed to weeks or months, and enables them to maintain high-quality real-time communications,” says Joggerst.

Ultimately, the newly-combined company aims to become the leader in secure, contextual and engaging real-time communications. “To do this, we will continue to focus on bringing the best products to market and empowering our customers in today’s dynamic marketplace, while working to move the industry forward,” added Joggerst.

Many CSPs have started the process of migrating to next-generation capabilities, but transforming legacy networks to IP and cloud-based technology is a major opportunity for Ribbon Communications going forward. It is believed that the network transformation — which started over 20 years ago — is still only about 50 percent completed.

Providing secure carrier-class enterprise communications capabilities will be another major strategic focus for Ribbon Communications moving forward. The financial, government, education and healthcare sectors all stand to benefit from secure embedded and contextual communications experiences, which would enhance their ability to collaborate and improve productivity. Along these same lines, Ribbon Communications also enables enterprises to seamlessly secure and bridge investments in existing communications environments from Microsoft, Cisco, etc. with a secure, web and mobile-based approach that includes the ability to offer seamless mash-ups.

Ribbon Communications has customers around the globe, including North America, Central and Latin America, Asia Pacific, Europe and the Middle East. Some of Ribbon Communications’ customers include leading service providers like Verizon, CenturyLink, Telefonica and British Telecom along with large enterprises like the University of Texas at Austin and the Los Angeles Public Library. These combined initiatives will enable the company to grow its customer-base and, in turn, empower them to better serve their customers.

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